PLM solutions refer to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise. According to this concept, a company is made up not just of its company departments but also of other actors such as business partners, suppliers, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM), and customers. By including these actors, PLM may allow this network to operate as a single entity to conceptualize, design, build, and support products and processes.
Amongst the PLM solutions are the computer-aided techniques, which are known to include Computer-Aided Design (CAD). Computer-Aided Design relates to software solutions for authoring product design. Similarly, CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM stands for Computer-Aided Manufacturing and typically includes software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. Some PLM solutions make it possible, for instance, to design and develop products by creating digital mockups (a 3D graphical model of a product). The digital product may be first defined and simulated using an appropriate application. Then, the lean digital manufacturing processes may be defined and modeled.
A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design of objects (or parts) or assemblies of objects, forming a product, such as the one provided by Dassault Systèmes under the trademark CATIA. These CAD systems allow a user to construct and manipulate complex three dimensional (3D) models of objects or assemblies of objects. CAD systems thus provide a representation of modeled objects using edges or lines, in certain cases with faces. Surfaces may be represented in various manners, e.g. non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS). These CAD systems manage parts or assemblies of parts as modeled objects, which are mostly specifications of geometry. Specifically, CAD files contain specifications, from which geometry is generated, which in turn allow for a representation to be generated. Geometry and representation may be stored in a single CAD file or multiple ones. CAD systems include graphic tools for representing the modeled objects to the designers; these tools are dedicated to the display of complex objects—the typical size of a file representing an object in a CAD system being in the range of one Megabyte per part, and an assembly, for instance an aircraft, may comprise thousands of parts. A CAD system manages models of objects, which are stored in electronic files. The graphical user interface (GUI) plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique.
More generally, the PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systèmes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provides an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
Such PLM solutions comprise a relational database of products. The database comprises a set of textual data and relations between the data. Data typically include technical data related to the products said data being ordered in a hierarchy of data and are indexed to be searchable. The data are representative of the modeled objects, which are often modeled products and processes.
PLM information, including product configuration, process knowledge and resources information are typically intended to be edited in a collaborative way. For instance, a team of designers working in a collaborative way may individually contribute to design a product by accessing shared information related to the product from remote sites. Since several users may access the same PLM information, it is difficult for each of them to have a clear view of any changes made by other users.
Now, in the PLM world, data update is a constant problem, specifically as the set of objects to update are interrelated. By update, it is here meant updating object data with respect to object specifications. Since a first object such as a product may reuse a second object, any changes in the specifications of the second object must be reflected in the first object. In some case, the amount of data that comes into play is so important that it might be impossible to load all data in memory to update them.
Moreover, updating data is still complicated when users work in a collaborative way. In such a case, the client computers of the users may be in communication through a product data management (PDM) system, such as the one provided under the trademark ENOVIA, via a computer network such as a Local Area Network (LAN) or a Wide Area Network (WAN). Requests performed by a client computer pass over the network, and responses provided by the PDM system are also transported by the network. Transferring data of objects involves a huge consumption of the resources of the PDM system, but also a large consumption of the network bandwidth. As a result, the network is congested, and others networks parameters such as latency, delay, jitter, packet dropping probability, queuing delay, bit error rate are degraded. The network is overwhelmed and its overall performances decrease.
The U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/431,277 by Assignee which is incorporated by reference herein, provides solutions for updating object data with respect to object specifications in a PLM system. An embodiment of these solutions comprise browsing the graph of dependence relations between objects. This embodiment substantially prevents from the risk of failures when updating PLM objects, and specifically objects edited in a collaborative way. To this aim, it relies on a smart use of dependence between objects.
Preventing risk of failures may not be sufficient when the number of objects in the PLM system is very high. One aim of the present invention is to improve the above-mentioned solution. This is achieved by reducing the number of objects to be taken into account.